Translation and Indian Literature - Some Reflections

Microsoft Word - 01 - Translation and Indian Literature - Some Reflections - M. AsaduddinSome ReflectionsSome ReflectionsSome ReflectionsSome Reflections
M. AsaduddinM. AsaduddinM. AsaduddinM. Asaduddin
Abstract The paper attempts to lay out the role of translation on interhuman space at various times and places in the world in general and in the Indian situation in particular. Renaissances in various parts of the world were a function of translation into those languages. Translation has an undoubted place in the history of ideas and the history of translation is the history of human civilization and (mis) understanding.The paper goes on to talk about the Indian situation in particular, both endotropic (=one Indian language into another) and exotropic(= Indian language into English).It elucidates the originary moments of translation in Indian history and concludes that translation, the impressionable interface that it is of cultural traffic, is a great tool of intercultural synergy.
The history of translation is the history of human civilization
and understanding, and sometimes of misunderstanding. Stories
travel from culture to culture, and their transmission through
translation takes innumerable forms. The classic case is said to be
that of our own Panchatantra. In an evocative essay, Amitav Ghosh
(1994) has the following to say about Panchatantra:
“These stories too have no settings to speak of, except the
notion of a forest. Yet the Panchatantra is reckoned by
some to be second only to the Bible in the extent of its
global diffusion. Compiled in India early in the first
millennium, it passed into Arabic through a sixth century
Persian translation, engendering some of the best known
Translation Today Vol. 3 Nos. 1 & 2, 2006 © CIIL 2006
2 M. Asaduddin
of middle eastern fables, including parts of the Thousand
and One Nights. The stories were handed on to the Slavic
languages through Greek, then from Hebrew to Latin, a
version in the latter appearing in 1270. Through Latin
they passed into German and Italian. …[T]hese stories
left their mark on collections as different as those of La
Fontaine and the Grimm brothers, and today they are
inseparably part of a global heritage.” 1
Moments of significant change in the history and civilization
of any people can be seen to be characterised by increased activity in
the field of translation. The European Renaissance was made
possible through the massive translation by Arab Muslims from the
work of the Hellenic tradition. In the case of India, though there is
no consensus about the originary moment of Indian Renaissance –
whether there was an Indian Renaissance at all in the European
sense, and if there was one, whether it happened simultaneously in
different languages and literatures of India or at different times, there
is no disagreement about the fact that there was a kind of general
awakening throughout India in the nineteenth century and that was
made possible through extensive translation of European and mainly
English works in different languages, not only of literature but also
of social sciences, philosophy, ethics and morality etc. Translation
has a special meaning for the people of north-east India because in
some literatures of the north east, the originary moment of literature
is the moment of translation too. For example, in the case of Mizo it
did not have a script before the European missionaries devised a
script to translate evangelical literature into Mizo. Raymond Schwab
(1984) in his book, The Oriental Renaissance, has shown how a new
kind of awareness took place and curiosity about the Orient aroused
in the West through the translation of Persian texts from Sadi, Rumi,
Omar Khayyam and others on the one hand, and Vedic and Sanskrit
texts from India on the other.
Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 3
In the Indian tradition we have an exalted notion of
translators. We do not designate Tulsidas, Krittivas, Pampa or
Kamban as ‘translators’ of our great epics but as great poets per se.
However, in India, if we leave out the re-telling of the stories of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata in regional languages, the first
significant translations, to my knowledge, took place at the time of
Emperor Akbar. In his efforts to promote understanding among
religions and promote interfaith dialogue, Akbar sponsored debates
among scholars of different religions and encouraged the translation
of Sanskrit, Turkish and Arabic texts into Persian by setting up a
Maktabkhana or translation bureau. Persian translation of Sanskrit
texts included Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagvad-gita, Bhagavat
Purana, Atharva Veda, Yoga Vashisht etc. The translations carried
out in this phase can be characterised as a dialogue of civilizations.
Prince Dara Shikoh (1615-1659), a profoundly learned scholar
himself, not only promoted this trend but made it his life-long
mission. His interest in comparative understanding of Hinduism and
Islam prompted him to take assistance from the Pandits of Banaras
with the translation of fifty Upanishads into fluent Persian. It was
completed in 1657 and given the title Sirri-Akbar or Sirri Asrar (The
Great Secret). This text was translated into English by Nathaniel
Halhead (1751-1830) in the colonial period, and into French and
Latin by Anqetil Duperron, the famous translator and scholar of
Zend Avesta. In the preface to the Sirri-Akbar Dara Shikoh explains
how, for some time, he was upset by assertions of radical differences
between Islam and the religious practices of the Hindus. He began
looking for a common truth between Muslims and Hindus. As
Muslims have a revealed Book which determines their world view,
he was looking for the divine word in the Hindu religion and thus
the translation of the Upanishads came to his mind. As is evident,
the primary pivot of Dara Shikoh’s translation project was synthesis
– spiritual, intellectual, social -- which would give us some clue
about the choice of text(s) and the strategies employed in the
translation. His own book, Majmua Al-bahrain, written in 1654-55,
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seems to work out in considerable detail the terms of this synthesis,
painstakingly exploring equivalences and terminology between the
Sufi philosophical system of the Unity of Being (Wahdatul wajood)
and the Vedanta (The Asiatic Society of Kolkata took the initiative
to have it translated into English by Mahfuzul Haq in 1929). Dara
Shikoh’s project required that he must ignore asymmetry and
cultural specificity, but there were others who were only too aware
of the pitfalls of such projects. An interesting example is provided
by Mulla Badayuni who was ordained by Akbar to translate the
Ramayana into Persian. The mulla, a staunch believer, hated the
command of the emperor, but had to carry it out, a task which a
contemporary scholar has described as a kind of spiritual
punishment to him. Not only was it repugnant to his religious
beliefs, he found the task of transposing a polytheistic worldview on
a fiercely monotheistic one particularly daunting. The concept of
divinity being shared by a host of gods and goddesses is not only
unfamiliar in the Islamic worldview, but is a cardinal sin. There were
fierce debates among scholars of translation as to whether it was
appropriate to translate Allah into Ishwar or Bhagwan, rasool into
avtar or yugpurush, Ram into Raheem, and so on, because in these
cases one was not simply translating Arabic into Sanskrit or vice
versa but also making statements of equivalence between concepts
whose semantic universe was widely divergent and the cultural
difference that gave rise to such concepts almost unbridgeable.
Faced with the royal command Mulla Badayuni did translate the
sacred book all the while hating himself for doing the job. It will
make a subject of interesting research as to how he negotiated this
dichotomy between his translatorial ethics and the task at hand. This
also reminds one of the experiences of Eugene A. Nida, of the
American Bible society and a reputed translation scholar, about the
difficulty of translating the Biblical concept of trinity in cultures and
languages that do not have this concept of Godhood.
Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 5
The next great moment for translation in India, and
specifically in the context of North Indian languages happened
during the heyday of British colonialism. It started when Fort
William College was established in Calcutta in 1800 and the
Scotsman, John Gilchrist became its principal. He, along with his
munshis, set themselves the task of putting together in simple
Hindustani works in Persian and Sanskrit like Gulistan, Qissa
Chahar Darveish, Qissa Gul-I-Bakawali, Dastan Amir Hamza,
Singhasan Baattisi, Qissa Alif Laila o Laila. Though this was done
ostensibly for the instruction and acculturation of the British officers
who came to India to rule the country, the easy accessibility and
lucidity of the prose made these works of romances extremely
popular, and they were translated and retold in many Indian
languages making a deep impact on their literatures. G.N. Devy, as
indeed other literary historians in India like Sisir Kumar Das also
credits Persian and other Islamic languages with facilitating the rise
of indigenous languages. Devy says, “The emergence of bhasha
literatures coincided with, even if it was not entirely caused by, a
succession of Islamic rules in India. The Islamic rulers – Arabs,
Turks, Mughals – brought with them new cultural concerns to India,
and provided these currents legitimacy through liberal political
patronage. The languages – Arabic and Persian, mainly, and Urdu
which developed indigenously under their influence – brought new
modes of writing poetry and music. The intimate contact with
Islamic cultures created for the bhasha literatures new possibilities
of continuous development” (Devy 1995) These possibilities were
realised through translation and adaptation. Two prose romances,
Qissa Chahar Darvesh and Qissa Gul Bakawali were very popular
across many Indian languages. In an essay on Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee’s emergence as an architect of Bangla prose, Tagore
remarks, “…with his emergence the darkness and stagnation that
gripped Bangla literature disappeared, and disappeared the legacy of
Vijay Basanta and Gul-i-Bakawali, those escapist romances…”
(cited in Mukherjee 2003:27, my translation). The impact of the
6 M. Asaduddin
literatures of the Middle East was inevitable given the long and
sustained Indo-Muslim encounter which is certainly one of the most
significant civilisational encounters in history, making possible the
emergence of personalities like Ram Mohan Roy, a truly multi-
lingual scholar, who wrote with equal felicity in several languages
including Arabic and Persian. He wrote his first book in Persian, and
its introduction in Arabic. The Persianate literary values and themes
suffused Indian literature till the middle of the nineteenth century but
it is a matter of speculation as to how lasting that impact was,
because it seemed to have disappeared as rapidly. Moreover, apart
from institutional sites there were very few individual efforts to
translate, absorb and assimilate the literature of the Middle East.
Sisir Kumar Das, the historian of Indian literature, compares the
Indo-Muslim literary encounter with the Euro-Muslim encounter in
Spain, more specifically in Andalusia, and points out that while
Perso-Arab intervention in Spain and prolific translation of Arabic
works into Spanish had its lasting impact manifested in the
provincial poetry and the emergence of the troubadours, no similar
impact can be discernible in India. This makes him speculate
whether the Indian mind, at that point of time, was less open to
translation and assimilation from alien sources. In an essay written
in Bangla for the journal Desh he writes: “Foreigners had come to
India, many of whom had learnt Sanskrit, translated from Sanskrit
into their own languages. But Indians had hardly shown any interest
in foreign languages or literatures. Translation has taken place from
Sanskrit and Pali into Tibetan, Chinese, Arabic and Persian. The
Greeks had come to India and ruled in the north-west of India for
one hundred and fifty years, and from this confluence the Gandhar
art emerged … but one does not know of any learned Brahmin who
learnt Greek or read the poetry of Homer or reflected on the
philosophy of Plato. This happened in Indian culture time and again”
(Das 1994:34, my translation). He further remarks that even in
matters of translation from Sanskrit into Indian languages, people
have shown interest in works with a religious intent. Taking the
Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 7
instance of Bangla literature he points out that though the
Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Gita were translated from Sanskrit
into Bangla, no one showed much interest in translating say,
Shakuntala, Uttar Ram Charita, Mudra Rakshas, Mrichchakatik,
Meghdut or Kumar Sambhav.
The greatest impact exerted by any Persian text on the
imagination of Indian writers during the colonial period is Omar
Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat, not the original one but the English version
mediated by Edward Fitzerald’s translation or ‘transcreation’, and
this happened at the fag end of the colonial period. By the thirties of
the twentieth century, it had been translated into most of the Indian
languages, creating a stir in poetic circles and giving rise to new
ways of writing poetry in some languages. Haribanshrai Bachchan
both translated and transcreated it in Hindi. One he called Khayyam
ki Madhushala and the other simply Madhushala. So widespread
was the impact of these two versions that they gave rise to a new
trend called ‘halavad’ which can be roughly translated as
‘hedonism’. The Marathi translator Madhav Patvardhan who was a
Persian scholar and who had initiated ghazal writing in Marathi
produced three different Marathi versions of it between 1929 and
1940, which present multiple perceptions of the original. The
reception of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat in different Indian
languages constitutes a unique case for Translation Studies and an
analysis of the strategies adopted by different translators in so many
Indian languages will help us to make coherent statements about
indigenous translation practices. In this context, Borges’s seminal
essay on the reception of Alif Laila O Laila i.e. the Arabian Nights
in the European world can serve as an example (2004).
As the Orientalists lost to the Anglicists, Persian literature
and language lost its salience by the middle of the nineteenth
century. The new language of power was English, and with English
language a wholly new world opened up to the people of India. Soon
8 M. Asaduddin
there emerged a section of writers and intellectuals who can truly be
said to be “translated men” in the most comprehensive sense of the
phrase. Though brought up on traditional Indian literary and cultural
values, their mental horizon was formed by literature written in
English or translated from English. The lack of openness on the part
of Indians to foreign literature that Sisir Kumar Das bemoans with
reference to an earlier era does not seem to be valid for this phase of
history when Indians took massively to works of English literature,
reading them with passion, translating them and adapting them to
their purpose. It is important to remember that the phenomenon of
colonial modernity that was negotiated in the nineteenth century
India and that has changed us irrevocably was possible only through
translation. The writers in various Indian languages were invariably
reading European and English authors, and translating, if you take
the larger view of translation, these into the Indian languages. There
were prolific translations from Shakespeare and some lesser known
Victorian novelists like G.W.M. Reynolds. The writings of Addison
and Steele were very popular in India and the prose tradition as it
developed in some Indian languages was indebted to them. The
famous Urdu periodical Avadh Punch (1887), which facilitated the
growth of a kind of sinuous literary prose, used to publish the essays
of Addison and Steele regularly. As pointed out before, many Indian
writers read and translated these authors and assimilating their style
and content, tried to make use of them in the development of their
own literatures. The emergence of a genre like the ‘novel’ can be
traced to this phenomenon of translation and assimilation. To take
some stray examples: In Malayalam, Chandu Menon’s Indulekha
(1888), commonly regarded as the first novel in that language, was
an adaptation of Disraeli’s Henrieta Temple (1837); in Urdu, Nazir
Ahmad is usually regarded as the first convincing practitioner of the
genre and his novels were based on English prototypes, his
Taubatun Nasuh (1874) being based on Defoe’s The Family
Instructor; In Bangla, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was greatly
influenced by Walter Scott’s practice of the genre of the ‘historical
Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 9
novel’. Frequently, works in English (or those translated into
English from other European languages) were adapted to the Indian
situation and domesticated to an appreciable degree. These
translations and adaptations opened a window to world literature for
Indian readers. Rabindranath Tagore recalls discovering a “pathetic
translation of Paul et Virginie (1787)” in the Bengali serial,
Abodhbandhu (The Common Man’s Friend) in 1868-69, over which,
“I wept many tears … what a delightfully refreshing mirage the story
conjured up for me on that terraced roof in Calcutta. And oh! The
romance that blossomed along the forest paths of that secluded
island, between the Bengali boy-reader and little Virginie with the
many-coloured kerchief round her head!” (cited in Joshi 2004:312).
The colonial administration gave utmost encouragement to the
translation of Western texts that would facilitate the process of
acculturation. It would be unfair to expect that the translators of that
period were sensitive to the aspects of complex cultural negotiations,
and such ideas as suggested in statements like “translation as a
practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations
of power that operate under colonialism” (Niranjana 1992). In fact,
if one takes a close look at the translation of literary texts of that
period it will be found that translators were not unduly concerned
about loyalty to the original text or they agonized much over a
definitive version or edition of a text. Translations -- more
specifically, literary translations -- were carried out more or less in
the “fluent tradition” as Lawrence Venuti (1995) defines it in the
context of the English translation of Latin American texts in North
America, where translations often masqueraded as the original.
Whatever that be, it can be asserted with reasonable certainty that we
are what we are today in the realms of literature and language by
virtue of the literary and cultural exchanges and negotiations that
took place in the nineteenth century. Priya Joshi, in her essay,
“Reading in the Public Eye: The Circulation of Fiction in Indian
Libraries”, mentioned earlier, studied the reading pattern of the
people in the nineteenth century and concluded:
10 M. Asaduddin
translation – not just the literal translation of
reams of printed matter but also a symbolic and
metaphoric translation in which the Indian world
was carried forth from one state to another
through the act of reading and interpretation.
The encounter with British fiction generally and
the melodramatic mode in particular helped
Indian readers translate themselves from a
socially and politically feudal order to a modern
one; from cultural and political subjection to
conviction; from consumers to producers of their
own national self-image (Joshi 2004:321).
Thus, the project of nation-making was intimately connected
to the wide dissemination of works in translation. The concept of the
nation as the ‘imagined community’, as Benedict Anderson would
have it, if it ever took shape in India, did so at this time through the
publication of novels and the translation of novels, not only from
English but also from and among Indian languages, and through
publication of periodicals and other means of print capitalism.
Right in the middle period of the Indian colonial encounter
with the West, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, translation
between and among modern Indian literatures began. Translation
from Bangla literature formed the staple diet of many readers in
different Indian languages. Bankim’s novels, Anandamath (1882) in
particular, were translated into most of the major Indian…